Manufacturers are accused of hindering food poisoning studies

Manufacturers have been accused of endangering people's health by failing to co-operate with health authorities when they try to identify the sources of food poisoning outbreaks.

The Health Protection Agency's (HPA's) Dr Bob Adak has criticised manufacturers' obstructiveness during difficult, time critical epidemiological studies to identify the sources of food contamination.

Presenting research on the microbiological status of ready-to-eat foods such as sandwiches and prepared fruit and vegetables to the Food Standards Agency's Advisory Committee on the Microbiological Safety of Food (ACMSF), Adak said: "I do get weary fighting with manufacturers over the statistics and being intimidated by manufacturers. We need to do something with manufacturers to ensure investigations are expedited expediently."

ACMSF member and chief microbiologist for Sainsbury Alec Kyriakides expressed concern about this lack of co-operation from the industry: "I hope that it is the minority of the industry that is resistant to investigations."

The HPA study found that the illness Listeriosis was linked to sandwiches and poor kitchen hygiene, sometimes resulting in cross-contamination and infected food handlers. But manufacturers were also attacked for not doing enough when the HPA was trying to identify sources of contamination with pathogenic micro-organisms during production, processing and distribution of ready-to-eat fruit and vegetables. This leads to more geographically dispersed food poisoning outbreaks.

The ACMSF also raised fears that contaminated fruit and vegetables might be a more significant cause of illness than was currently recognised.

Adak highlighted the problems of identifying the sources of contamination by the example of fresh basil contaminated with Salmonella Senftenberg last year. "People don't recall eating basil [usually a minor ingredient when combined with others in meals or sandwiches]; they are more likely to remember the salmon," said Adak. This can make it very difficult to identify the source of outbreaks, he said.

Fortunately in the basil case packaging had been required to show provenance, which enabled 11 tracing steps to be cut and several weeks saved in tracing the source back to Israel. "It was an incredibly lucky break," said Adak. It is in just such areas that manufacturers could be far more helpful, he claimed.

"Few people have the expertise to track back low level intermittent contamination in the field - and there is no commercial incentive," he added. "Even in very good companies with good hazard analysis systems, pathogens can still get through."